


Sunlight

by twenty_minutes



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 09:20:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23469055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twenty_minutes/pseuds/twenty_minutes
Summary: Plant! Charles x Metal! Erik, actually a thinly veiled account of natural history with loving descriptions of plants.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 37
Kudos: 20





	1. Precambrian and Paleozoic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sketch of characters

No matter how fast or far he fled, the burning asteroids continued to ram into him, and magma churned and spilled even as he tried in desperation to gather his core. His axis shuddered under the senseless bludgeoning. 

This stoning was inflicted with malicious caprice - he would still himself long enough for some silica-brushed armour to form, and then the blinding slam of another vindictive bullet would shatter, melt, or vaporize most of it. There was nothing to do but to try and try again, fearful as he was. There was no one there for him but himself.

He would never admit it afterwards to Charles, but he cracked. He sobbed angrily into the darkness. In the privacy of hurting, he digested and crushed and refined his pain until he imagined he could feel it within him, a molten iron ball of exquisite, hot rage, thrumming through his mantle, concussing every crystalline vein.

He learnt the meaning of endurance. It was, after all, a lesson that spanned more than half a billion years.

When the beatings stopped, he hurtled on in the solitary confinement of silence, swinging his moon. It was a part of him that had been knocked off in the bombardment, but as expected of himself, had coalesced back harder and tougher than before. He wielded his moon with a hard-won pride, ready for a second round.

But the burning asteroids never came back.

\--

The waves dislodged him sometimes, and he would disappear, but then he would wake up again. Flashes of consciousness came and went: the jagged deeps of the mid ocean trench disgorging a belch of rich, sulphurous blackness, warming him up from inside; a thermohaline current jerking him into life with cruelly meagre amounts of nitrite, sulphite, running out too soon; the way he hung from the twisted, frozen ropes of rock at the edges of alkaline hydrothermal vents, dying for a gasp of carbon dioxide.

He died and he lived again, and he died and he lived again, ad infinitum.

He would forget all this later.

Everyone has childhood memories. The intense, sensory experience is stamped within our hearts long before we know how to begin reflecting on them, yet long after they have shaped every angle of reflection and refraction. We are all accidental creatures.

Charles will be loyal to his childhood memories. Recollection of the generosity of sun and the harmony of mingling roots and shared soil will form the bedrock of an earnest, unshakeable faith in the possibility and perfection of love. He will consider who he is, and he will think he knows and loves himself.

But the yawning chasm of the sunken ocean and the infinite, opaque weight that crushed him into the seafloor will have been embedded too deeply to prise out.

No, our Charles is a self-made plant, blushing with the seasons and sparkling with dew and daylight with every rise of the sun. He burst into being, cyanobacteria on day one. He blooms on pelagic waters, exhaling with oxygen in floaty delight. Perhaps he overdoes it a little, and gets a glacial shock for it. When it warms up again, he snuggles into larger, welcoming cells, and soon they’re working together like he knew they would, and soft, translucent bubbles and bags are bumping into his kelp forests. He welcomes them all, and the leggy shells and things with feelers that follow, all of which seem to be mirrored down their halves. On land, with a fresh breeze pushing and sucking at him for the first time in all his life cycles, he plays with spores and stomata and other ways to keep the precious water. He hasn’t learnt to flower yet, but the world has flowered beautifully for him already.

Then lava tears across his forests, ash rolls across the skies, and he’s thrown into infant darkness and primordial terror.


	2. Permian Triassic Extinction

He thinks he’s imagining it at first.

As the smog of volcanic sulfur dioxide turns to acid rain, his forests are stripped from the land. Conifer canopies come crashing down into slurry to be entombed by volcanic ash. And as he fades from land and returns to sea, he begins to hear a heartbeat, metronome-steady. Lava scorches, blackens, erodes, and underwater, dark sand rains down like the skies above, misting the benthic deeps with olivine powder, aluminum silicate splinters, and iron-heavy grains, all humming with a slow song he has never heard from sand before.

Over the barren terrain, spores lifted on wind touch down on basalt.

His mind touches another’s.

The harrowing sense of alienation and solitude is like a slap in the face, and he pushes out, breaking past his usual manners when it comes to meeting the younger flora and fauna: _You’re not alone. I’m here with you._

But the stranger is gone.

And then so is he.

\--

From the open seams of the seabed cracked open by the explosions, methane and carbon dioxide well up and overheat the air. Charles shrinks to the higher latitudes. Forests fall. Land flattens into delta.

He starts on the Sisyphean task of repopulating the world.

\--

After the initial shock, he restrained himself from reaching out, and instead, observed the ecology proper for the first time, in all its kaleidoscopic iterations. He watched as the cyanobacteria picked up the slack in oxygenating the anoxic waters, apparently rebuking itself bitterly when wave by wave, the arthropods and mollusks were swept nevertheless into extinction. He bit back amusement as pelagic algae took various fishes under their wing. The two-meter long ichthyosaurs ruling the seas went bug-eyed at being treated like children by micrometer-sized coccolithophores. The shelled ammonoids spread into the shallow marine waters with zooplankton encouragement. Most fishes cozied up instantly with the cheerful kelp.

 _Didn’t bother checking if anyone was here first?_ He spoke up blandly when a cloud of phytoplankton directed a shark over his seafloor ridge, hoping a little childishly to spook the ever-confident stranger.

It was like punching a pillow. The exclamation that returned was as pleasant as could be.

_Oh! How have you been, my friend? You departed so early the last time, but perhaps you’re finally free for a little chat?_

_My friend,_ he repeated to himself. He’d ascertained since their first meeting that the algae would float anywhere, that the moss balls would feed anyone, that the seaweed would oxygenate indiscriminately, hence the numerous scenarios he’d privately entertained of the warm welcome he’d get from plants of various colors and sizes had grown less and less appetizing the more he watched every other creature in this blasted superocean get it save him. Then again, junk food was still food.

 _Yes,_ he said out loud. _Is this your new project?_

 _Oh! –_ comes the startled reply – _You’ve seen me around? Yes, I hope to get the Acanthodii up and running again. Lovely community. Most of them are freshwater these days, actually, so isn’t it lucky you got to see this one here? Although admittedly that’s because our friend seems to have gotten lost. I was just showing him that nematode patch he could use to tide over this while with, but if by any chance, you know the way out to the shore…?_

The idiot fish was already coming too close to his vent; a warning puff of smoke sent it zipping back in silver fear.

But the green motes were still hanging there expectantly, and so he gave the briefest directions back to the coastline, upon which the cloud of algae beamed incredibly loudly.

 _I help where I can,_ explained the plankton. _I am the first, after all. And life has been hard on all of us since the eruption, hasn’t it?_

A pause.

 _I see,_ he said, retreating further under the ocean floor. Then he hesitated. _What about you? There aren’t many trees on land left._

 _How thoughtful of you to worry about me! Well, I’m working on it. I have so many Pleuromeia on the continent that I can barely keep track of each species! And speaking as Pleuromea dubia – well, it’s not a tree, but do you know how many scale trees I was previously? It’s a rather nice change! Both for me, and for everyone else too, I would think. So you don’t have to worry at all. But thank you so much, Erik. May I call you that? Having names helps me remember all of you better. I’m Charles._

_Yes,_ Erik said, still processing all this. Then fatalistically and because he was a masochist: _I guess I’ll see you around?_

Charles seemed to smile. _And I you,_ he said. _Although I can’t quite see you, of course. You’re inside the spreading sea floor ridges, yes? I can’t exactly see you, but I know your mind is beautiful. I‘d love to see you out and about sometime._

Erik felt himself grow cold inside.

 _I’ll see you around,_ he said.

\--

The Acanthodii, more commonly known as the spiny shark, would not survive the culling that would take 96% of the planet’s marine species and 70% of its terrestrial. Neither would the trilobite. The list of lineages that have and will come to a permanent end is long, and vanishingly few species will be preserved in amber or in stone – fewer still in popular imagination. Most paths lead to dead ends, but no two paths are the same.

Charles takes on some euglena and swims unseen with the last Acanthodii through a sheltered creek, as if he was a flagellated gymnosperm sperm cell again, swimming with the first of their kind, through the thronging clamour of the cool Carboniferous marshes all those millions of years ago. Both he and the shark are silent. He parts reeds for it, lets himself into an eddy of small, yellow leaves so he can brush it aside for his companion.

In a flash, a sinewy eel lunges at the shark from the below. Its capture is successful, and the prey is dragged away by its pale belly, writhing futilely.

When it’s over, Charles slips away.

\--

 _You look like shit, Charles,_ comes a comment from around his roots, and the dwarf glasswort gives a sharp shake to his slender, green stems, the necrosis at the tips of the small leaves kicking in with a sting.

 _Raven!_ He says cheerfully to the briny waters. _How have you been?_

_Fine. Better than you. You’re overworking yourself again._

_I’m not._

_You are._

_I’m really not_ , Charles insists with another shake of his shrub.

 _You always think–_ She cuts herself off.

He can tell that she doesn’t want to rehearse the same bitter argument again, and neither does he. He feels her resonance flicker away and back, a light fugue of her surface thoughts.

Cold ropes of wind lash against the vast lagoon, bringing up rippling waves that end at its feathered and frayed margins. Towards the open end of the bay, the sun is melting beneath a naked horizon, and he can feel his self-assurance sink with it.

 _Sorry, Raven,_ he says, punctuating the swollen silence. _I just want to help in any way I can._

He feels her resigned shrug.

 _Take care of yourself first,_ Raven says finally. And with that, she leaves, not giving him an opportunity to reply.

When she’s gone, there’s no reason for him to stay night-side either, so he lets go of the mangrove and moves himself across the earth – through the ferns that splash the foothills of highland mountains, past the horsetails gently nodding in the shade, and finally settling and letting himself expand over a riot of a tropical jungle, the sun directly overhead, to renew his perpetual business of pumping out breathable air.


	3. Mesozoic Era

He was kept vigilant by the constant pinpricks of tiny meteoroids fireballing and bursting in the atmosphere. He checked his grip on his moon – it had loosened over the years from fatigue, but it was important to be prepared, so he swung it menacingly nevertheless.

At one point, he flexed his core, felt the ocean floor and the supercontinent above him fracture, then hesitated – what if Charles got upset?

No, Charles delighted in new species; what better way to get new species than through new environmental niches? New seaways, fun.

More importantly, Charles never got upset.

\--

Charles seemed upset.

 _We are what we are,_ said Erik somewhat unhelpfully.

 _Yeah, and what you are is a couple of torn leaves in a smelly dinosaur intestine,_ said Raven.

Another wave of embarrassment nearly knocked Erik over, though to be fair, there wasn’t a lot of room to be knocked over in. At present, the three of them were crammed in a sauropod’s gut – stifling hot and sticky with acid, not the most pleasant experience.

Another wad of ginkgo leaves, soggy with saliva, plopped down from the gullet opening right smack in their midst.

 _How have you been, Erik?_ Charles, speaking for the first time, sounded faint and faraway.

 _He thinks it’s “terribly uncouth” to be caught being eaten,_ Raven explained to Erik. _Well, we can’t all live on sunlight and water like him. **We** have to eat._

Her tone was as hard as flint.

_I know, Raven. Start feeding if you need to._

_I do._ She said sharply.

The microbes started from the fringes of the tears that the ginkgo leaves had received earlier, and the air inside the chamber steadily grew thicker with methane. The gastroliths tumbled into the shredded fragments of the leaves every now and then.

 _You can feed on me too, Erik, I don’t mind,_ Charles suggested.

Erik said nothing, and Charles seemed to take that as assent.

Raven ate.

The silence seemed to be cooling most of the heat of Charles’s embarrassment and Raven’s anger. Erik felt tentatively for Raven’s mind. It took him a while to place the emotions he was sensing from the churning methanogens.

It was desperation and determination and an undercurrent of fervent worry.

It took even longer for Erik to place the emotion he was sensing from what remained of the dark, wet leaves.

It was compassion.

\--

Vertebrate herbivores swarmed and fanned out over the continents: lone stegosauruses rooting for luscious cycads, herds of sauropods charting ambling courses between the conifers that dotted the landscape. In the desert interior of the continents, spores were overtaken by seeds, and in the long afternoons, against the humming of damselflies and bees, small, plain, white flowers soaked up the colours of the sunset and the night, unfurling over millennia into hot perfumed bursts of crimson, lemon-yellow, vivid violets and deep blues. Brushstrokes of fallen petals dashed the dust-blown grasses that had begun to thatch the land. Iguanodons snapped up the fleshy fruits that hung heavy as jewels from trees.

Erik was, honestly, quite smitten.

They continued to bump into each other in stomachs, where Charles was always dishevelled and flustered, which Erik liked too. From their conversations he gleaned that Charles and Raven had been meeting like this for a long time already, in creatures that hadn’t yet had gastroliths. The mushy pulp never faltered in his earnestness in offering himself up to be eaten.

 _You need to eat to live,_ said Charles on one occasion. The unsaid follow-up: _I don’t._

Erik translated it in his head: _You need to struggle to live. I don’t._

Maybe Raven was right.

He let go of continental rock, sinking past soil to plunge back into the depths of the sea.

\--

Here the reefs were wild with clams that stuck up in masses of inverted-cones. Schools of fishes frenzied as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs chased them. Erik ran some magma under the ridge again, and the lithosphere stretched, and the ocean itself rippled.

Suddenly, the phytoplankton awoke.

_Erik, this is amazing. Look at that, is that a new species of rudist clam? Did you do this?_

Charles had finally discovered where he’d been hiding.

 _I did,_ he said shortly.

Charles rewarded him with a joy so pure and true he felt his iron core melt a little, to his annoyance.

_Do you need anything? How can I help?_

_The clams,_ Erik replied.

He watched from the basaltic ridge as Charles smoked over the eager clams, curling over an oyster bed. Where on land sunlight was so bright it was almost a solid, tangible block, here it was fragile and silvery, and the fog that floated in the water was tinted a sparkling gold, glowing with vitality.

Charles always made it look so easy.

Phantom scorches blasted his mantle.

 _Charles_ , Erik said slowly. _Have you never thought… If you gave too much of yourself, you might–_ He searched for a euphemism, but four billion years of solitude hadn’t done much to make communication his forte, and he caved: – _die?_

He felt more insect than metal as Charles turned the microscope of his attention onto him.

_You might be right, Erik. But my predators will die out without me, while the sun will never stop shining and water will never dry out. I suppose, since I was the first, I may well be the last…_

_Don’t you remember the asteroids?_

_The asteroids?_

It was the bewilderment that really set him off.

 _Maybe it’s been so long that you’ve forgotten. But I haven’t._ Erik shoved a memory of agony and pain at Charles – _You’re not invincible, none of us are. You need to fight for your life. You can’t just sit back and let everyone else **eat** you–_

_Why can’t I? Just because my life is precious doesn’t mean theirs isn’t, too._

_Because your life is **yours**!_

Magma slammed the underside of the seafloor, scattering the ecology above in billows of hissing steam – everything that could swim darted away in a flurry, while everything else shrank into their shells and rock crevices. The crash of the current rolled the phytoplankton away, and he sensed the distance between their minds stretching.

_Erik–_

Erik pushed him away.

\--

 _The hell did you do to him?_ demanded the microbial mat on his hydrothermal vents.

It was the first time Raven had sought him out of her own accord. Typically, Erik was the one hovering in dinosaur stomachs hoping to bump into Charles, who was usually hoping to bump into Raven, and the three of them would just hang out whenever they saw each other.

So Erik had never realized it before, but his vents were absolutely coated with angry archaea, and to his horror he found he was slightly intimidated.

 _What?_ He said defensively. _I just told him to take care of himself better._

_I’ve been telling him that for billions of years and I’ve never seen him so shell-shocked, you bastard, I repeat– WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM?_

A coil of nausea twisted Erik from inside at the thought of Charles shell-shocked.

 _I showed him… when I almost died…?_ He said uncertainly.

\--

Life flickers like a small candle in the dark.

Nestled deep within the sand dunes, a newborn rodent with eyes still closed takes a few breaths, heart beating madly under almost translucent skin. It doesn't last the hour.

Heather flowers drink greedily from the rain, relishing the wind and the sun, tempting curious bees with nectar, until the tide of winter returns all colours to drab yellow.

A mayfly emerges from water at dawn, searching and single-minded; it drops unmoving from the air by dusk. 

Lakes fill and dry to salt.

Forests rise and fall.

The song of a lonely cricket threads through a thunderstorm, and ends before the rain is over.


	4. Cenozoic Era

The universe rolls some dice.

Jackpot.

An asteroid hits a shallow sea of a planet. It instantly vaporizes both sea and seafloor, gouging out a boiling pit of molten rock and superheated sulphurous gas, incinerating life on half the nearby continent in a single moment. Flesh becomes ash and wood becomes charcoal. Bodies remember their long-forgotten mineral origins. Then the kilometre-high tsunamis rippling out from the impact wipe all memory away. 

Blink once; a pale blue marble flashes incandescent with fire. Blink again; it’s cooled to grey.

The Cretaceous Paleogene extinction ushered in by the asteroid collision takes 75% of the species on the planet. As the bases of food pyramids disintegrate, their apexes disappear forever into history – the non-avian dinosaurs, the large marine reptiles. Deep underground and underwater, shrew-sized creatures stir uneasily in hidden nests and burrows. You know what they are, so you know how it goes - soon we’ll be walking out of darkness and into the age of the mammals.

But we’re not quite there yet.

\--

_I wouldn’t have forgotten the asteroids, if I’d ever experienced them before._

A small seed is huddled in the arms of a boulder on a shore.

There’s a pulse of sadness.

_I wondered, you know. Why, if you’d always been around, you never said anything to me back then. Why you’d left me alone for so long until recently._

_No, I would never have. I didn’t know. I must have been born after what you showed me._

They’re quiet for a while, listening to the crash of waves on the shore and the sad lullaby of the moaning wind and to each other’s heartbeats– one a rustling orchestral symphony, the other a glacial, deep toll of a bell.

_Erik, what are you really?_

_…I don’t know. Metal, I think. Maybe rock, if there's enough metal in it._

A thin rivulet of water forms, filtered through cracks in the stone, washing over the seed cradled in its chest. It’s ice-cold.

_Is it raining?_

_Only slightly._

If he strains, he can hear the shatter of rain outside.

_I should be out there. But I can’t do anything – it’s too cold–…_

_You can’t do anything out there._

_They need me._

_Maybe too much._

_I–_

_Go to sleep, Charles. You’re not the “first”. You’re not their mother or their father. You’re not responsible for them._

_They all need me._

_I don’t need you._

Charles cracks a smile, despite himself.

_You don’t?_

_I don’t._

_You don’t think I’m, quote, incredibly giving and kind?_

No, Erik thinks he's going to be spewing steam at some archaea later.

_…I think you’re a self-sacrificial idiot._

_You don’t think my flowers are pretty?_

_…_

_You don’t wish my diatoms would go deeper into the sea?_

_…_

_You don’t like me?_

_…_

Charles laughs.

 _I like you,_ the seed says to the rock.

\--

With Charles asleep, he exhaled from his volcanoes, an infinitely long and slow breath, forcing the landmasses further apart than before, so each isolated piece could serve as island ark for evolution. The tuatara, a three-eyed lizard, will be saved by this effort, later becoming the sole survivor of the Rhynchocephalia order, one of the scatter of species that will manage to pull through on smaller, safer ground. Insectivores began to branch into primates, and thus the bushy-tailed Plesiadapis arrived, shimmering up and down trunks with dexterity, ghosting through verdant, broad-leaved foliage. As the sky cleared up, the seas of pale ferns that had risen in the dimness gave way again to extravagant tropical rainforests, glittery in the brightness of day, bustling anew with the fertile chatter of furry tree shrews and oddball rodents rooting through undergrowth with short snouts and blunt teeth. Flying lemurs flung themselves off branches with a gusto that gave Erik heart attacks.

 _Be fucking careful! You nitwits!_ He shouted at them.

They chittered back nonsensically.

He had no idea how Charles usually handled the suicidal morons.

Knowing Charles, probably with empathy and affinity.

Knowing Charles…

Erik brought two continental plates crashing together, closing the sea between them. They crumpled into each other and slowly, folded up into a mountain range.

Fifty million years later, the Himalayas will be the tallest mountain range in the world, with a gallery of the past inhabitants of the Tethys ocean written in its rocks, fossils of spiral ammonites and bony fishes still swimming the mountains. The two highest summits, Mount Everest and K2, will sit in the Tibetan plateau, graced by the clouds with the largest store of glacial ice and permafrost outside the Artic and Antartic, and by the monsoon winds with a handful of spores and seeds.

\--

He’s alone when he wakes. The waters are relatively shallow, which means neither Raven nor Erik should be around, so he sits quietly, a seagrass meadow gently swaying in dappled sunlight.

The reefs are overflowing with lush corals waving in the current. Gone are the sturdy armies of clams. The plesiosaurs seem to have shorter necks, and the ichythosaurs seem to have lost their back flippers; on closer inspection, he realizes those aren’t plesiosaurs and ichythosaurs at all. He doesn’t recognize what they are.

In fact, he recognizes very little of the alien environment he sees now.

 _Charles?_ comes a mellow, baritone hum.

 _Erik_.

 _Come up and take a look_.

A crushing dread settles inside him, but he supposes he has to, at some point or another. Just when he’s about to lift himself up, however, Erik cuts in again: _Follow me._

Erik leads him through blankets of sand and rock fissures, so his only way of following Erik is through unhatched seeds and tiny mosses, and he's unable to catch more than a sliver of the outside world each time. A rush of cool water here. The warmth of sun there. He feels the air getting thinner.

 _Look,_ Erik finally says.

From the mountain, the landscape is awash in a soft mist that stretches vanishing into the distance. Hills float above the inky ridges and here and there, individual trees lightly crest a milky white ocean. The sky is clear and vast. Sunlight pools over the frosted leaves of a snow lotus, bathing it in liquid light.

 _How is it?_ Erik says, and Charles hears the nervousness in Erik’s voice, and wonders why he’s never heard it before.

 _Not many animals can get up here._ Erik is saying. _I thought you might like a place to get away from everything, where you could just be yourself. I mean, I would be here too, but I could always leave if you want–_

_Erik. I wouldn’t ever want that._

Because it hits him then, that every mountain and rock and grain of sand laid out before him is murmuring with tenderness and warmth.

The snow lotus blossoms.


	5. Anthropocene, Post-Anthropocene

They never stopped arguing, however.

\--

Sometimes, he was a grain silo, and the wheat would say: _Isn’t it interesting how this species of monkey feeds? They grow me not just to feed but as food for the other animals they feed on! And they have this fermentation process–…_

 _Don’t some ants do that too?_ Erik pointed out, having dredged up a vague memory of Raven complaining about having to sit through Charles’s excited gushing.

 _Ah, you mean the leafcutter ants that farm fungus, like Atta cephalotes,_ Charles said, sounding pleased that Erik had remembered. _Yes, but not on this scale!_

Sometimes, he was a chainsaw on a harvester, and the tree, falling, would say: _But look at what they’re building, Erik._ Sometimes he was a lumber mill, and the logs, laid out for processing, would say: _Every species deserves its own freedom to grow._

He scoffed. The flowers had just been fretting over the dwindling numbers of bees the day before. Did Charles’s “little buzzing friends”, as he called them, not deserve the same freedom to grow?

Sometimes he was a shower of bullets. A ballistic missile. A munitions factory.

He was the heavy artillery that crushed grass underfoot into a matted mesh that soaked up blood even as it said, mangled and pounded: _Please, you’re better than this. Don’t hurt them._

He was a steel bomber, skimming the silent, permitting asphalt that the coral ridges on the island had been levelled into, rising into the air. He was the atomic bomb it carried.

He flew north.

It was a quiet morning, with clear skies and light winds. Below him, the deep blue of the ocean was coated in areas with the dull umber of oil slick, and much further out, he could see the plains of concrete, the tumult of industrial smog. He could see the pale beige that drowned out sparse crumbs of green, that indicated deforestation.

It was hours later when he reached a strip of an island crawling with so many monkeys that he could hear the babbling gibberish that Charles told him was characteristic of all the younger species, without even having to listen carefully for it. As he floated above the island, more and more of them were noticing him and jabbering away. He felt a brief, dislocated tug of curiosity as to what they were saying, despite the flat certainty that it would be nothing but the same vile, warped spew of blind destruction he’d seen of them so far.

Perhaps they were trying to explain, or rather, justify their actions.

He waited a while, as if to humour his imaginary Charles.

Nothing but gibberish.

He’d already known that in all likelihood, there was no explanation or justification forthcoming, or explanation or justification at all. There was no deeper meaning in the inarticulate noises they made. They perpetuated a violence as senseless as the asteroids.

 _They bring this on themselves_ , Erik thought.

\--

Picture a boy, old enough to have been sent to assemble grenades at the local factory, but not old enough to be sent to the frontlines of war. It’s halfway through the year 1945. His parents may or may not still be alive – it’s irrelevant.

He’s neither religious nor superstitious. He can’t help but eyeroll at anything supernatural. He’s been to places of worship before and felt a touch of something spiritual, but he suspects that’s largely attributable to the atmosphere, no, _architecture_ of the place. He respects the beliefs of his religious friends, but when it comes right down to it, he’s not even agnostic, he’s fundamentally and profoundly atheistic, areligious. He read about philosophical materialism and empiricism at the library what seems like a lifetime ago, and it was like a kindred spirit reaching out to him from the pages of the book.

An air raid siren rouses him from his sleep – not an infrequent occurrence these days. It’s a Monday, although it doesn’t really matter when he’s at the factory seven days a week. He sits up on his mattress on the floor, staring blankly at the wall. The siren blares on.

The boy feels hot tears sting his eyes for no reason at all, but the tears don’t actually fall. He closes his eyes.

“If there’s a god out there...” He says quietly. “… Please let the war end soon. Um, I have a little sister… She’s four this year. I hope she gets to go to school one day. I thought she'd go to my old school. So. Please let the schools reopen, I guess. I know I used to complain a lot, but…”

He doesn’t know how to pray; he’s never prayed before. He knows he’s saying it all wrong. And even as he speaks out loud, he’s still thinking mutinously that prayers don’t work. So he doesn’t know why he can't seem to stop fumbling for words, halting and awkward, babbling gibberish to an impassive wall.

He doesn’t get to finish his prayer. Outside, almost directly above him, a bomb detonates, and the explosion lights up the morning sky like a sunrise.

\--

The first nuclear weapon used in human warfare is called Little Boy.

\--

When the sea level drops, the lake becomes landlocked, and as saline levels inch relentlessly upwards with every gust of dry wind, she draws in potassium and chlorine ions in single-minded pursuit of osmotic equilibrium, holding herself intact. Every cellular membrane a breath away from coming apart. Every microbe spread out naked on the salt flat beneath a pitiless sun.

When the hairline fracture in the underground rock tears open to let superheated water surge up into a hot spring, she reinforces her insides with heat shock proteins, hardening and stabilizing her enzymes with hydrogen bonds in the face of boiling groundwater. Bacteria and bone alike dissolve all around her.

When the atomic bomb opens the door to a nuclear winter, she knits the fragments of her broken DNA back together into chromosomes, regenerating full genomes from radiation-ruined scraps. She makes redundant genome copies to absorb the damage. Amidst the deranged prattling of the sagging bags of tumours that lurch around, her sanity and clarity of mind remain ironclad.

She learns, half-amused, that Erik is very trigger happy on the red button when a supervolcano eruption comes hot on the heels of the nuclear bomb, barely a hundred thousand years later.

Charles fights Erik about it all the time, but she gets it. Because if she could, she would scream out too.

When Charles replaces his mantra about being the first with one about sunshine, she doesn’t speak to him for the first few million years. She teeters on the knife’s edge of the temperature horizon. The sun cooks her alive. At times like this, it feels like she and Charles aren’t even living on the same planet – he’s solidly on earth, whereas she’s trapped in purgatory and hellfire.

But she can survive this.

She can and will survive anything.

The sun swells. The sands of time melt into glass. One day, inevitably, she runs into Charles again.

A coastal grove of slender trees is sheltering innumerable small birds in latticed shadow, whispering sweet, hushed nothings to the mute creatures, utterly unconcerned with the saltwater lapping far too high up its roots far too strongly. And suddenly she sees, crystal clear in her mind’s eye, the sanctuary crashing down in slow motion during one high tide, reproducing the wreckage of countless other woods steeped on the shore that she’s seen time and time before.

 _Charles._ She says, suddenly feeling so worn out. _You never change._

 _Raven,_ he replies, a single word soft with surprise and fondness.

_It’s good to see you again._

\--

Time withers leaf and root. The tallest mountains crumble into soil beds for seeds to grow. A supercontinent forms, and at the centre of the giant landmass, wildfires run across the tall grasses of the prairies, burning for years, flames leaping languorously into the dry air, insect-like clouds of embers flowing into the night sky. Each time the bonfire dies out, bushes push out from ash and dormant root systems, bereft of the animals that once darted through them, but just when the animals venture back, wildfire ripples across the lowlands again. When the trees and grass wink out, the remaining branches of primates and mustelids follow them into the dark. As the years burn and break, it gets harder and harder to coax new species to life, but that does mean they fight less and less too.

Half a billion years after the first nuclear bomb, the supercontinent is rifting apart, and a gamma ray burst from a nearby supernova damages the ozone layer enough to kick off the final massive extinction event.


	6. The Earth falls into the Sun

There used to be a crater here. Tectonic and geological processes have since erased the soaring cliffs and waterfalls, and now there’s only mud and bog, slowly seeping, quietly weeping, soggy peat accumulating all cold, dead things and their dreams as they sleep in a soft pillow of slime and sludge.

Over here are some waterweeds, mottled yellow and black by UV overexposure, even fully submerged, shaded by an outcrop.

Over there are some nameless worms, curling and overturning the black dregs and debris.

 _Tubifex worm._ Charles supplies when he feels Erik come up behind him. _Carries all sorts of vectors and diseases for salmonids, tetras, and the like._

The schist wall is silent as a tinny, unintelligible mutter continues to emanate from the twisting, half-dead tangle of worms.

 _Causes more harm than good,_ Charles adds.

 _Not when there aren’t any more fishes around,_ is the even reply, the tone of which somehow becomes even flatter towards the end.

 _Lucky they’re all dead then,_ Charles feels like retorting sarcastically, but can’t bring himself to.

 _No. There aren’t,_ he says instead, avoiding the argument.

The tension holds for a moment more before it deflates.

He feels Erik’s presence ease more fully into the slab behind him, so close Charles feels like he might fall into him, like a shadow being swallowed up in a larger one.

The image grips and disquiets.

 _Before I met you,_ Charles says.

_I thought I more or less understood everyone. Inability to communicate meaningfully notwithstanding, I thought that my extended observation of them – over millennia, over all their lifetimes – granted me an intimate enough familiarity with all their likes and dislikes, their needs and their wants, their habits and their behaviours... I thought that I understood everyone._

_But I didn’t even understand you, before you showed me what you’d been through. And maybe after that, I understood you less. And that’s with no communication barrier between us to speak of._

Pallid leaves brush an impenetrable rock surface.

 _I have, for the longest time, greatly overestimated how much I knew of anyone. I still do, sometimes, but then I catch myself, and realise again that what I think they’re feeling and thinking, is and only is what_ I _think they’re feeling and thinking. For all I try to understand and empathise, I’m still trapped in my own mind._

In front of them, the worms coil in on themselves, stirring the sediment. The mutterings of an indecipherable tongue fill the air.

 _Before I met you,_ Erik says.

_I thought I was alone, and would forever be. I heard the others speak occasionally, but it never even occurred to me that there was an other, or that what I heard was speech, until I met you. You were the first I could understand, that could understand me in return._

_We fight. Difference is inevitable. I think the only way you can truly, fully understand someone else in the sense of “understanding” that I think you mean – is to_ be _them. To fully, truly understand all that someone else is thinking and feeling… seems like a pipe dream at best, and overstepping one’s bounds at worst._

_I value you for you. Not in spite of our differences, but because of them. I don’t understand you fully, and I never will, but what I do know is that I–…_

Charles waits as Erik falters.

_…that I–… that you mean a lot to me._

Nothing comes after that, and there's only Erik's warm, thrumming presence, resting against his back.

 _I love you,_ Charles wants to have heard, and to say.

 _Remember me,_ he wants to say.

 _One lifetime was too short for spending with you,_ he wants to say.

But words fail; no one understands the worm when it speaks.

 _You mean a lot to me too_ , he echoes.

\--

The sun fires the sky; its heat bakes the ground. The slight shrublands of flax and milkweed catch flower one last time. Small, almost invisible ones that birth small, almost invisible seeds, because bird and insect have long been extinguished, and there is only the hot, dusty wind to carry them across barren terrain.

The soil they touch down on is nothing like basalt. Instead, they’re patches of perfectly adjusted loam, oases in the vast wasteland. Never too warm, never too cold, and always rich with nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and all other nutrients and minerals that might be needed for germination.

The seeds are always stillborn.

The graves are always fresh.

\--

Deep underground, the cavern is completely frozen over, and has been as far back as she remembers. Although it’s only a faint memory, really; she seldom visited a locale so severely inhospitable to anyone other than herself.

Now the ice deposits are a final refuge. She steps into them without hesitation, and feels the cold begin to bite into her, and the petrification beginning to steal over her.

Inhale. Exhale.

And she begins pumping out antifreeze proteins, swelling her lipid membrane with double bond kinks to preserve fluidity. She’s tirelessly tuning every enzyme and polymerase, searching for the elusive configurations that can survive and function at the subzero temperatures.

There will be time enough to grieve for Charles when all this is over.

\--

The sun’s luminosity steadily increases.

The oceans boil away into a thin, decomposing layer of scum over a hardened, immobile earth.

Then the rock surface of the planet begins to liquefy.

Then the ice caves melt.

Now Erik is alone.

\--

Sunrises and sunsets flash past. The deep, wide shadow of the earth on itself, the disc of night cut out from sunlight, swings and sweeps across the unbroken expanse. The world is quiet here.

He remembers Charles as he last saw him — splotchy and wilted, bristling with wounded vanity and pride. He remembers Charles as a dandelion seed, winged with feathery white tufts, glowing with hope. The glossy flourish of his petals. The indefatigable leaves.

And he finds that there’s still so much he wants to tell Charles, still so much he wants to say.

_I love you._

_I think of you everyday._

_I thought we’d have a lifetime together._

The words remain unspoken; there’s no one to say them to now.

\--

Six billion years later, there are oceans again, now of blazing bright lava, spurting out like white-hot blood from the open veins of the charred earth. Without an atmosphere, the billows of steam and sulfur roiling up are whipped instantly away by solar winds that snap and sing. The flight of the burning planet tracks an inescapable orbit that spirals inwards, bringing it ever closer to its swollen, incandescent sun.

\--

The closer he gets to the sun, the louder the thunder of his iron bell heartbeat. It concusses his very core. Lava churns; crystals pulse in and out of magma in resonance with every shudder. He’s never felt so alive before.

He reaches for his moon.

His only weapon slips out of his grasp. He can only watch as it disintegrates into a sparse ring circling him. Then it smashes down on him in a burning rain of meteorites and asteroids, scooping out gaping holes that no sooner appear than are engulfed again in slag and molten rock.

\--

Half a billion years later, the earth is gone.

The story is almost over.

Once upon a time, there was a flower on a mountaintop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i started writing this on impulse, when i chanced on one of those self-insert power fantasy isekais. a crack fic. in this one, the protagonist was reborn as grass. nothing new - i just read a novel from the pov of a car. but i skimmed the first few chapters and found that his "level-ups" were things like "larger leaves", "more ant colonies", and i was like, no, he should be evolving genetic mechanisms like polyploidy, if i were to write a story starring grass, i could do SO much better.
> 
> on completion. i am extremely embarrassed to confess that, as you may have already realized, this story has no mention of polyploidy and i did not, in fact "do SO much better". what has been laid out here is far from what i planned. in a way, that's a comfort, because the themes are grand, and this piece of fiction cannot pretend to be equal to them.
> 
> and the message is simple, but that's no real measure of how easily it can be conveyed.
> 
> still, it's important to try.
> 
> the published title is 'sunlight'. the working title was 一寸先は光, roughly "one inch ahead is light", which was supposed to be a pun on 一寸先は闇, an actual proverb meaning "one inch ahead is darkness", meaning "no one knows what the future holds". this subtext has become non-text, as language allows yet prevents me from telling the story i want to tell.
> 
> my gratitude for every reader, and special thanks to specialmouse, who has been boundlessly supportive (maybe not anymore, now that i finally tipped my hand in this chapter?) - and who seems to have understood in part, to my shock, what i was trying to say. my ethics colour my pen heavily, and i understand that they make for work that’s optimistically, an acquired taste, and pessimistically, downright unpalatable. i’m not racist or anything. i just have a bleak view of life, and believe we all go through it ultimately alone.
> 
> i expected from chapter 1 to be screaming into the void, and have been touched to be proven wrong.
> 
> again, english is not my first language. hence while i'm on my soapbox, i must take the chance to advertise that i am looking for a beta reader.
> 
> finally, and again, thank you for reading :)


End file.
